I have been thinking about Giraffes all weekend. On Saturday I was feeling very exhausted so we sat down to catch up on the Professor Brian Cox series; Wonders of Life. In episode 3 he was talking about natural selection & the infinite possibilities of life presented by the way our DNA works, and how natural selection narrows down that infinity to the range of animals that we have on the planet today. He was in Madagascar, where many many unique species exist due to the fact that Madagascar has been separated from the other land masses around it for millions of years.

Then there were a few shots of him in Africa, and he came upon Giraffes, and talked about them with the same wonder as I have for them.

Professor Brian Cox & a Giraffe

Terry Pratchett has a great way of looking at the probability scale and the chances of things happening… He talks about the fact that just because something doesn’t happen to occur in our universe, it will be happening in another universe… as he describes it in his ‘Discworld and Terry Pratchett’ Wiki-space;

Everything you can imagine is happening out there somewhere.

Which he says is the definition of a Multiverse. Even if it isn’t happening here, there will be a whole sub-infinity of parallel universes where it is. A universe is a small thing by comparison, as it contains only the sum totality of any one chain of causal events.
A multiverse could perhaps best be described as “Everything”

Everything is…. well, everything. Not just the things that we perceive are, from our lowly vantage point, of only being able to see and act in three dimensions of space and what we perceive to be one-way linear time. It contains everything that is, was, will be, and more importantly all the mights and maybes. Things and events that we might distantly speculate about, or that we wonder might have happened if events had played out a bit differently

Or was that not your question? It’s also the name of his first Discworld book

He has a great Wikispace detailing all the characters, places, significant objects and their interactions so that will help, having the ideas in his head mapped out literally in the internet. Hopefully that will help him keep the connections going 🙂

Sorry Barbara – I’m a goofus in the morning. I was joking because it’s the equivalent of the secret handshake among Pratchett fans. “What’s the color of magic?” “Octarine, of course.” I know, it’s stupid… 🙂

Aha! That explains it. I have had a few notifications, and today when I was on my iPad I saw notifications coming up that you had replied to some of my comments, but then when I went to notifications I couldn’t find them

I think the problem is that the posts we are commenting on are older than a certain date, and the notifications are probably assumed read after a certain length of time, so when I look for unread notifications my notification thingy tells me I haven’t any unread ones despite the fact that I have just had a ‘pop up’ telling me of a new comment.

I will as you say, have to go back through all my comments and read your replies 🙂

I thought maybe that was it too, but I just got a notification of a comment from someone on a post that is two years old. And up to a few days ago, I was getting notifications from you on real old ones. I think it is being worked out. Anyway, I think you are pretty much through my flag waving phase and getting into some more thoughtful posts. You are to be commended for braving it up to this point!

In at least one universe there are very small giraffes that have been domesticated and make very good pets. They are just the right height to wake you up in the morning by licking your face whilst still keeping all four feet on the floor. There are also guide giraffes for the blind that are able. unlike guide dogs, to press the buttons in lifts with their noses.

Great response! Fantastic idea to bring up the multiverse and the discworld series. In our world, the 11th possibility is for a coin to somehow land on it’s edge when flipped. In a different world out among the multiverse, that would the norm, and having it land tails or heads up would be the 11th possibility.